“Another company gave me a much greater energy production estimate than yours.”

We hear this occasionally. When asking the question, “How much electricity will a solar energy system produce” people sometimes get different answers from different companies.

Our production estimates are conservative — we try not to over-state the amount of energy you can expect to get from a specific-sized solar energy system. An internal company mantra of ours is, “Under-promise and over-deliver.”

That said, we use standard industry tools to make our energy production estimates. For most of our energy production estimates we use PVWatts, which is a publicly-available tool for solar energy estimating put out by the National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) for anyone to use.

Like any calculator, NREL’s takes a bit of skill and knowledge to use. We have, on occasion, walked a prospective customer through the process to help them understand proper data input as well as how to interpret the results.

There are other solar companies that offer sky-high estimates and unrealistic promises. We do not.